Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

Ch. 6

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

Ch. 3

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Ch. 1

Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

Ch. 6

The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.